Digital Noise: Music and Tech

I tuned into Thursday's conversation between Microsoft's Robbie Bach and financial analysts at CES. Bach is the president of the company's Entertainment and Devices division, which includes Xbox, Windows Mobile, retail channel relationships, and most of the other fun stuff. It also includes the Zune, which, given its lack of financial impact on the company, didn't merit much of his time.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Toward the end however, one analyst (not identified on the recording) suggested that the company's foray into MP3 players had been a waste of time. Today, Microsoft talks about providing software and services on "three screens"--the PC, the TV, and mobile devices. So why did Microsoft make a foray into hardware, which alienated its device-maker partners (remember PlaysForSure?), and probably cost the company tens or hundreds of millions so far.

Bach insisted that music was a required component of the "three screen" experience, and that Microsoft had to be a leader rather than a mere technology provider in this space. If Microsoft hadn't built the Zune, it wouldn't have been able to create the Zune software and Marketplace, which have become pretty solid after a couple false starts. But he admitted that if the company were to enter the space again with perfect hindsight, it would do things differently.

How, exactly? He didn't say. But he did say that regardless of whether Microsoft had built its own MP3 player, it would have changed its relationship with every OEM and "caused just as much disruption." In other words, the Windows Media strategy wasn't working. Consumers didn't want a confusing array of devices and stores and formats and DRM schemes that didn't always work together. They didn't want to think about this stuff at all! They just wanted to rip their CDs, maybe buy a few tracks online, and take all this stuff with them.

My guess: PlaysForSure would have been just as dead. Microsoft would have created a new music brand, a new logo program, new hardware specs for the devices, new client software to replace the Media Player for syncing and library organization (like the Zune client), and a new store that could only be used with this new software and these new devices (like the Zune Marketplace). In other words, there still would have been a clean break between old and new. The only difference is that Microsoft wouldn't have manufactured and marketed the actual Zune devices, and consumers might have had a greater choice of hardware from the get-go. This might have led to quicker innovation--for instance, some forward-thinking OEM probably would have created a touch-screen "Zune" by now.

The only question: after the PlaysForSure debacle, who would have gone along? Which is probably why Microsoft built the Zune hardware in the first place.

Last week, I expressed some doubt that Cisco Systems would be able to come up with a multiroom audio system that's usable by mere mortals. After all, home networking is still a pain to set up and debug, and Linksys isn't exactly a beloved consumer name.

(Credit: Cisco)

Reading John Falcone's preview of the Linksys Wireless Home Audio System calmed my fears a little bit. Not only has Cisco hired some industrial and user interface designers, it has gotten a few things right that Sonos missed.

First, the Linksys system is completely wireless, while Sonos requires you to have at least one device in the Sonos network plugged into your router--either a full audio base station (redundant if you've got a computer with speakers in the same room as your router) or a wireless bridge (a seemingly unnecessary $99 expense).

Second, the Cisco system wisely includes an iPod dock, so you can beam all the music from your iPod--including DRM-protected files--around your house. Sonos accomplishes this task by connecting to the iTunes library on your main PC, but it can't play DRM-encumbered files (a problem that is going away soon). More importantly, Cisco's approach lets visitors plug their iPods into your home audio system--a great way to let your guests play DJ or share their recent discoveries.

Third, the remote has a touch-screen interface--something Sonos achieves only if you have an iPhone and download the free controller application.

Fourth, the individual base stations have small infrared remotes--one problem with the Sonos system is that you need to control volume from the universal controller, or walk over to the base station and manually adjust it.

Finally, it looks as if Cisco took my advice for Sonos and is releasing several bundles, including an entry-level one-room bundle with just an amplifier, speakers, and an infrared remote. Now, if it can just undercut Sonos on price by a few bucks--say, for example, if all the bundles are less than $1,000--it could have a winner.

Understand that I haven't had a chance to test the Linksys audio system out, and neither has CNET, so there could still be some show-stopping bugs or poor UI decisions that sink the whole product. But at least these initial announcements show that Cisco has considered the competition very carefully and isn't wading in blind.

Bill Gates skipped the Consumer Electronics Show this year, leaving the coveted opening-night keynote spot to CEO Steve Ballmer.

While Ballmer's always an engaging and funny speaker, the company didn't have much to say: a couple long-rumored deals for Live Search, some Windows 7 features that have already been shown at the Professional Developers' Conference and reviewed all over the Web (the beta will be publicly available by the end of the week), and Kodu, a Microsoft Research project moved to the Xbox 360 (pretty cool, but it's been around for a couple years).

But no Zune for Windows Mobile. No Zune news at all, in fact. And not much on the mobile front, either. I guess we'll have to wait for the GSMA Mobile World Congress, held in Barcelona, Spain, in February.

CNET News' Greg Sandoval is already covering the story, so I won't belabor it, but kudos to Apple and the three holdout record labels--Sony, Universal, and Warner--for reaching an agreement that will result in more than 8 million songs being available on iTunes with no digital rights management (DRM) restrictions. (EMI has made DRM-free songs available on iTunes since last spring, but only 10 percent of the music sold in the U.S. comes from EMI.) As Greg reports, Apple will also let users with existing DRM-encrusted downloads upgrade to a DRM-free version at a higher bitrate--256kbps--for an extra 30 cents.

For only 60 cents, I can upgrade both of my iTunes Store music purchases to DRM-free versions.

To remind everybody why this is important: this now means that most of the songs you buy on iTunes will be playable on devices and software produced by other companies. Yes, the files are still going to be in Apple's preferred AAC format rather than the more widely supported MP3, but a lot of recent digital music products from other companies do support AAC, including Microsoft's Zune (software and device) and the next version of the Windows Media Player, as well as Sony's most recent Walkman digital media players. SanDisk's popular Fuze and Clip, however, don't support AAC--a failing the company will hopefully fix with a software update.

This truly means that DRM for single-song downloads is dead. iTunes is the No. 1 distributor of digital music by a huge margin, and in fact is the No. 1 music retailer in the U.S., ahead of all brick-and-mortar outlets. DRM will live on in subscription-based services--the record companies aren't going to let you download unlimited music for one month's $15 subscription, then cancel and keep all that music--but otherwise fuggedaboudit.

My only gripe: the news comes six days too late to make my No. 1 prediction for 2008 true. Apple is also making music downloads for the iPhone available over 3G cellular networks in addition to Wi-Fi--another prediction that I made for last year.

A digital-audio workstation is probably the most important purchase an audio engineer has to make--it's the command and control center for your entire computer-based recording rig, and you'll be spending most of your time in it.

Unfortunately, pro-level DAWs are complicated pieces of software, and everybody's got their own opinion about what's best--ProTools is widely considered the industry standard, but I know several experienced engineers who don't like it at all.

Because of its complexity and importance, choosing a DAW is not the kind of decision you can make from reading reviews alone, or even from talking to fellow travelers. You need hands-on time.

That's why Cakewalk has released a free 30-day trial version of Sonar 8 Producer Edition, the newest version of the company's high-end DAW. (Cakewalk also makes a wide array of audio-recording and manipulation software for consumers.) It's available for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP or Vista (Mac users need Boot Camp or another Windows emulator). Recordings made with the trial version can be saved permanently.

The download is here.

Update: Microsoft has just posted an official explanation for the problem--it's related to a clock driver that doesn't handle leap years properly. So apparently, the Zune 30 is date-aware. The fix: wait for January 1, let your battery run down, charge it up again, and turn it on. I'd suggest giving that a try before trying to pry the case open to unplug and replug the battery.

Reports are coming in from all over the Internet that 30GB Zunes--the original model, which Microsoft shipped in 2006 and 2007--are all freezing up at once.

The pink-and-black screen of death.

I have one of these original Zunes, and indeed it's stuck. (See the picture, which was taken with my, ahem, iPhone...no freezing there.)

A bit of background: Microsoft actually didn't build or design these first-generation Zunes--Toshiba did. From what I've read, only the 30GB models that have been updated with the Zune 3.0 software (released in November 2008) are freezing. This points to some sort of problem with the firmware on whatever processor was used in the original Zune, and its interaction with the Zune 3.0 software.

Could this be a Y2K-type bug?The Zune uses Windows Media DRM 10 for Portable Devices to support the Zune Pass subscription service. That DRM system includes an on-board clock to ensure that subscription content can "expire" if users stop paying their fees. (Basically, if you don't sync the device every so often to let it confirm that you've still got an active subscription, it disables the subscription content. The exact time period is set by the manufacturer, but I don't know how long the Zune lets you go without a resync--or even if it uses this feature.)

But I doubt the clock actually knows today's December 31--rather, it probably counts a total number of seconds since some particular zero date near the device's creation. So that clock might have reached a number that's too large for the field created to hold it, but the fact that it happened on the last day of 2008 is probably an unfortunate coincidence. It's almost funny, except for the fact that I've got 25GB of music locked up on this brick.

I'm expecting Microsoft to issue some sort of firmware update to fix the problem, but the timing--a week before CES--couldn't have been much worse. If Microsoft so much as mentions Zune next week, look for every wag in the audience to Twitter about the pink-and-black screen of death.

As I said in my 2008 sum-up, people tend to overestimate the amount of change that will happen in one year--which means my best bet for 2009 would be to simply reiterate my almost-there predictions from 2008, like the death of DRM and the decline of the concert industry.

What does my 2009 crystal ball predict?

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

But that would be boring. Thus, behold my all-new-and-improved predictions for music and technology in 2009:

Zune phone--sort of. 2009 will finally be the year that Microsoft takes the wraps off its mobile-entertainment strategy, and the Zune brand will be prominently featured. Perhaps as early as next week at CES, Microsoft will announce a version of the Zune Marketplace and accompanying client software for mobile phones--perhaps only Windows Mobile, but perhaps some other platforms as well. There's an outside chance that the company will also announce plans to build its own music phone, but not at CES, and only if the third-party approach fails to gain traction against the iPhone and RIM. I don't think the Zune-phone strategy will be tied to Windows Mobile 7, though, as I don't think that platform will come out until 2010.

$99 iPhone. Apple will introduce a 4GB iPhone that will sell for $99 with a two-year AT&T data contract. (Or, less likely, lower the 8GB price to $99 by mid-year.) With this new lower price, the iPhone will continue to gain market share at the expense of Symbian and Windows Mobile. Apple will also lower the price on the iPod Touch at the same time.

RIM will get music right. Research in Motion continues to do well against the iPhone juggernaut, although the Storm was widely considered a stumble. But so far, RIM has focused on its core strength--communications--and left music as something of an afterthought. This will change in 2009, as RIM upgrades its phones with more memory and a better media interface and signs deals with Rhapsody or other online music services. Or maybe RIM will just up and buy Rhapsody owner RealNetworks: according to Yahoo Finance, RIM's cash on hand ($1.68 billion) is greater than Real's market cap ($479 million) .

Sony will surprise. Not by lowering the price of the PS3 enough to start taking market share from Xbox 360--sorry, but that horse has left the barn--but by releasing a touch-screen Walkman-branded audio/video player at a competitive price point in the U.S. (Read: $1 less than the equivalent iPod Touch). Wi-Fi will be included, as will a link to a new online music and video store that's owned by Sony, but features songs and videos from other companies. (I agree with Donald Bell that a partnership with Amazon seems unlikely.) Reviewers will gush over it, and it'll help Sony recapture some of the old magic that's eluded the company. Music gadget of the year.

A big online music store will fail. It's never fun to predict failure, but the recession will claim at least one of today's major online music sellers--Napster, eMusic, or perhaps Rhapsody.

The Big Four will become the Big Three. Hard economic times lead to consolidation, and the music business was having trouble even before the latest downturn. Look for Guy Hands to unload EMI to Universal or Warner before the end of the year.

Ticket competition won't lower prices. Ticketmaster's contract with Live Nation ends on Jan. 1, meaning that there will be two national ticketing agencies handling sales for big arenas. But this competition won't lower prices--both agencies will still tack on service charges worth up to 20% of the list price. Why? Because big concerts still operate like a monopoly--your favorite stadium band is probably only coming to one place in your city this year, and whoever sells those tickets will have an exclusive.

Online-first releases will become the norm. Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, David Byrne and Brian Eno, Girl Talk, and a handful of other acts released albums in 2008 in online form well before they came out as a CD. By the end of 2009, at least one of the major labels will make it standard release practice, and dozens of releases from big-name artists will come out online first, perhaps even with a couple of free MP3 samples.

One major act will (temporarily) abandon albums. At least one major artist--maybe an aging legend with a strong touring base, less likely a hot pop or hip-hop act--will announce that they're no longer going to release full-length CDs. They'll go on to release at least a dozen singles--some exclusively online--with no intervening album. Their grosses will suck, though, and eventually they'll compile the singles into a good old-fashioned greatest-hits CD, sold for $20 at HMV and Amazon.com.

The next hip music town will be in an unexpected country. It's been a few years since we've had a ton of hype about a local music scene--I'm thinking about the kind of mainstream media fascination that found San Francisco in the late '60s, New York and London in the early punk days, or Seattle in the grunge era of the early '90s, complete with chart-topping innovators, flash-in-the-pan imitators, and movies featuring beautiful but tragically addicted twenty-somethings in period settings. We're due for another, only this time it won't be in North America or Western Europe. Brazil, India, or Eastern Europe could all fit the bill--are you ready for the St. Petersburg version of Singles?

Networking is a dark art, and putting the word "home" in front of it makes it no simpler. Debugging a home network is not for the faint of heart--the intelligence of the on-screen wizards peters out after the first few obvious fixes, and soon you're checking help forums, running ipconfig commands, and tweaking DHCP settings.

Their industrial design has gotten a lot better. But would you trust Linksys to build an easy wireless home audio system?

(Credit: Linksys)

So today's news from The New York Times--that networking giant Cisco Systems is getting into the consumer electronics business--filled me with dread.

The idea of piping audio files from your computer to your home stereo or other audio devices is valid: I'm a big fan of the Sonos Multiroom Audio system, and Logitech and Apple have also made a go at it. But all three of these companies specialize in consumer products. They understand--nay, live and breathe--the process of hiding complexity under a clear user interface.

Playing music from multiple sources in a single playlist on a Sonos system is simple. Connecting a Mac or iPhone to an existing home network is almost invisibly simple.

Cisco's purchase of Linksys got the company into the consumer home-networking space. While setting up my Linksys wireless router for the first time was relatively painless, thanks to a downloadable applet, I had to use their free phone support line several times over the next few years to debug mysterious problems that cropped up.

The support itself was great--a real person always picked up immediately, and they were always able to resolve my problem eventually--but the complexity of the underyling technology just couldn't be hidden. Any support call that asks you to log into your router to check your DHCP settings is not simple, even if you are walked through the steps.

Cisco's a solid engineering company. If it manages to hire some great UI designers and brands these products appropriately--coming up with names that are more interesting than these would be a start--it has a fighting chance. If it thinks that enabling multiroom audio is just a few simple tweaks to its existing home networking products, forget about it.

Not so great.

Predictions columns are always risky because it's easy to look back a year later and see how wrong you were. For the most part, I was on the right track, but too bold--as a wise prognosticator once said, we tend to overestimate the amount of change that will happen in one year, and underestimate the amount of change that will happen in ten.

Here's a rundown of where I was wrong--and right.

DRM will die. I'll give myself half a point here for predicting that all four labels would agree to sell DRM-free tracks on Amazon (Sony capitulated only 11 days into 2008), and for the fact that Microsoft added 10 permanent DRM-free downloads per month to its Zune Pass subscription offering. But I was completely wrong about iTunes--the vast majority of songs on the service still come with DRM, and iTunes Plus is still alive and well. More to the point, Amazon and other DRM-free services haven't made a dent in iTunes' dominance.

3G iPhone and iTunes. Wrong. I can't really take credit for predicting a 3G iPhone, since the CEO of AT&T had already let that slip, and Apple surprised me by refusing to open the wireless iTunes store to downloads over 3G.

No Zune phone. Right. Microsoft hasn't even announced a Zune client for Windows Mobile or other types of phones, although I expect an announcement of some sort next week at CES.

GarageBand will win a Grammy. Wrong. I still expect a recording made with GarageBand or another low-cost digital audio workstation to win a Grammy someday, but it didn't happen in 2008.

Mashups will go mainstream. Half a point. I read more about mashups this year than any year since 2005: music critics expended a lot of digital ink on GirlTalk's latest album, Feed the Animals, which consists entirely of samples. But the rest of the world didn't care much--the pay-what-you-want download didn't exactly light up the Web like Radiohead's In Rainbows did, and the CD (released Nov. 11) didn't crack Billboard's top 200 albums of the year.

Year Zero will become the precedent Wrong. Nobody else went to such lengths in 2008 as Trent Reznor did in 2007 to promote Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero. Lack of creativity? Or just too much work? A few artists, including The Fireman (Paul McCartney and Youth) and David Byrne and Brian Eno, experimented with online-first releases and packages at multiple price points, two other trends that Nine Inch Nails was early to embrace. But as far as full interactivity goes, Trent stands alone.

The world's best record store will go online. Totally wrong. Amoeba is still firmly planted in the bricks-and-mortar world--California, specifically. Chalk this one up to wishful thinking.

The loudness wars will end. This is a bit subjective--you'd need a detailed sonic analysis of releases during 2008 to prove it--but I don't hear quite as much over-compression as I did a couple years ago on mainstream radio. That said, Metallica's Death Magnetic was slammed for continuing this unfortunate trend--some listeners thought the music sounded better on Guitar Hero than on CD!--so I'll have to say I was wrong.

The concert business will follow the recorded music business down. I was wrong in the specifics--revenues were actually up from 2007--but only because average ticket prices were higher. Attendance was down 2%, a smaller drop than the 20% last year.

Led Zeppelin will play again, but not tour. More wishful thinking--Robert Plant wasn't interested.

Two out of ten--ouch--although I was heading in the right direction on a few others, just moving too fast.

Will I do better in 2009? I'll lay out my predictions for the coming year tomorrow.

Yesterday, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a post suggesting that president-elect Obama needs to do more than throw money at ailing industries, but actually needs to "reboot" America by investing in infrastructure and education. In Newsweek, law professor and intellectual property thinker Lawrence Lessig argued for a more narrowly focused reboot of the FCC, which should be encouraging technical innovation but instead tends to favor big incumbents.

But what about the music industry? Yes, the big labels have earned a lot of scorn for their technophobia and suing their customers--a practice which finally ended last week--but music is a multibillion-dollar industry, responsible for employing hundreds of thousands of people, and in the midst of several years of steep sales declines. If we can bail out the U.S. auto industry, and spend at least a trillion dollars saving the global financial system and reinvesting in infrastructure, surely we could spare a dime for the music biz.

Serious economic thinkers might scoff at the comparisons--finance touches everybody, and our entire infrastructure has been designed around the automobile--but music's more than a lark or a luxury. It's a core part of the entertainment industry, which is one of the few areas in which the United States is still an exporter and world leader rather than an importer. Even The Economist has acknowledged the deep biological importance of music, leading off its annual double Christmas issue with an investigation of why we love music.

As with Friedman's proposal to save America, my proposal to save music would start at the bottom--it's not enough to give the big labels and radio stations a few hundred million dollars to stem their losses and encourage re-investment. Instead, we need to create a culture of music appreciation and nurture the talent that will lead to the next generation of musicians. Here's my dream list:

Music education and training. In the U.S. education system, music and art are the last classes to be funded and the first to face cuts. Yet, we always seem to be able to spend another few million on sports fields and equipment. The U.S. government should mandate funding for music education beginning in fourth grade, when most kids develop the attention span and coordination necessary to learn an instrument, all the way through high school. This will not only contribute to a strong base of musical performers, but the kids who lack the talent or drive to pursue music as a lifelong hobby will at least learn to appreciate the skill it takes for others to pursue it--just like youth sports creates lifelong sports fans. And professional musicians should be able to take classes in new areas--theory, audio production--without having to pay the entire tuition out of their own pockets.

Tax breaks. Bars, restaurants, and nightclubs under a certain capacity should be given tax incentives to hire musicians. (I'm not so sure about big promoters like Live Nation or stadium-type venues.) Same with radio stations that play a certain percentage of music from local or unsigned musicians. (Big corporate radio with its narrow audience-tested playlists has done far more to devalue music--and harm sales--than the Internet.) Cities should be encouraged to create music-nightlife zones with less-stringent noise restrictions and the appropriate level of police protection.

Stipends for musicians. As romantic as punk-squatters might seem, being a musician doesn't have to mean a life of poverty. Canada offers grants to non-classical musicians, including emerging artists with "self-training" (read: rock musicians). Yes, they must have shown a viable career for at least two years, but a one-year grant could be the perfect bridge between promising local band and national club tour. If we can give the U.S. auto industry $17 billion, surely we can spare a few hundred thousand a year to give promising musicians a chance to postpone their day jobs while they try and find a bigger audience.

Infrastructure. It doesn't have to be all about roads, bridges, and high-speed data networks. Cities with decrepit or nonexistent classical venues should be given federal dollars for construction. National Public Radio should receive increased federal budget--with a requirement to devote a certain number of hours a day to music, particularly types of music and artists who don't get played on commercial radio.

I'm sure you can think of other examples. My point: we've treated music as a luxury--almost as a joke--for too long. I'm not asking for a national Minister of Rock (although Jack Black might be good), but as long as we're opening the federal floodgates to revitalize the economy, why not invest in something that people naturally love and that does no harm to anybody?

Happy holidays.